Captain Silver

System: Sega Master System

Cheats Used: None

I like pirates, so considering the fact that there aren’t many pirate-themed games, the ones there are should be fun, right? Not in this case. The game is simple enough. You walk to the right killing enemies with your sword to get letters that spell out “captain silver”. As far as I could tell, nothing happens when you collect all the letters, they just disappear and you have to collect them again from the next group of enemies. This in itself wouldn’t make the game bad (although it does seem rather pointless), but the game is way harder than it needs to be due to you dieing after only one hit. I couldn’t even make it past the first level because of this, so I have no idea whether the rest of the game would have been any better. My advice? Give this one a pass.

Kirby's Dream Land

System: Game Boy

Cheats Used: None

This first game in the Kirby series is no less than a classic. While it is very short (only five levels), it is a ton of fun. The level design is fantastic and the music is excellent and very catchy. The game is easy enough that anyone, even young children, can finish it without too much trouble, although there is one boss that I couldn’t get past without being at full health (this is where save states come in handy). From this humble beginning, Kirby would go on to bigger and better things (Kirby’s Adventure for the NES is one of my favorite games for that system) and, although it’s not as high-profile as Nintendo’s other franchises, the series continues to this day with the release of Kirby’s Epic Yarn for the Wii. If you’re interested (and if you can find it) there was a very cute and enjoyable Kirby anime series. The English version was done by 4Kids and I think it’s the second best series they’ve done (after Pokemon, of course). Happy hunting!

Batman

System: TurboGrafX 16

Cheats Used: None

In 1989 when Tim Burton’s Batman film was released, there were several videogames released for multiple systems as tie-ins, as well as an excellent arcade game. The Turbo game, unfortunately, never made it out of Japan and that’s a shame because it’s a fun little game that every batfan should have in their collection.

Every other Batman game was a side-scrolling beat-em-up, but for this one, Sunsoft decided to try something a little different. Instead of being a side-scroller, this game is viewed from a top-down perspective. In each level you go around collecting all of the Joker’s chemicals, dodging his henchmen along the way. You can stun the henchmen with your batarangs and knock them off the screen for points, but they respawn infinitely so it’s better to just knock out the ones in your way and ignore the rest. Once you’ve collected everything in a level (indicated by a counter in the bottom right corner of the screen), you move on to the next. The game does get repetitive, but it’s still a lot of fun and if you like arcade-style games, this is one of the better ones on the system.

Space Battle

System: Intellivision

Cheats Used: None

Considering the era in which it was released, Space Battle is a remarkably complex game for its time. The main goal of the game is to defend your mothership against five groups of invaders. You have three squadrons you can deploy and when one of your squadrons encounters a group of invaders, you move to a battle screen which plays like a first-person shooter. If a group of invaders reaches the mothership, they begin attacking it and if you don’t fight them in time (for example, if all your squadrons are deployed elsewhere), the mothership is destroyed and it’s game over.

There are five difficulty levels to choose from, but even on the easiest setting, the game is very difficult. This is due primarily to the fact that the invaders seem to move faster than your squadrons do and it’s hard to get a squadron back to base in time to defend it. Despite this, the game is still a lot of fun to play and I imagine that if I spent some time practicing, I could get better at it. This is indicative of the types of games found on the Intellivision, which were often more involved than Atari games in an attempt to be better than the 2600, which was the reigning champion at the time. In fact, that you had to use your brain was the system’s chief selling point and it was advertised as “intelligent television”. This is certainly truth in advertising and as a first impression of playing on real hardware, I’m very impressed.

Mortal Kombat

System: Sega Genesis

Cheats Used: None

When Mortal Kombat hit the arcades in 1992, it caused a sensation, both for its violence (which upset many parent’s groups) and for it’s fantastic gameplay and visuals which featured live actors digitized into the game. In fact, this game was one of the primary reasons we now have a videogame rating system after congressional hearings on the subject of videogame violence. The game features eight fighters all dukeing it out for the chance to battle Shang Tsung and his top general, Goro. It would go on to become a huge media franchise, spawning many sequels as well as movies, tv shows, comic books and a ton of other merchandise.

So how about the home version? Unlike the Super NES translation, which replaced the blood with “sweat”, all the mayhem of the arcade original is intact in the Genesis port. The game isn’t terribly difficult due to the fact that it’s easy to spam your special attacks and I made it almost all the way to the end before I ran out of continues. The controls are perfect and simple enough for anyone to pick up and play and sound is decent as well. And, of course, it’s even more fun if you have someone else to play with. All in all, it’s very easy to see why it became such a phenomenon and why the series continues to this day.

My Newest Purchase

Hey guys! I just got a great deal on the Mattell Intellivision (thanks, Ebay!). The one I got came with the system (and all the needed hookups), the Intellivoice module and eight games all with instruction manuals and controller overlays, plus the instruction manual for the system and a few other goodies. I got all this for $50! Yay! I fell head over heels for the Intellivision after playing Intellivision Lives on the PS2. The problem with that compilation, though, is that they just couldn't manage to duplicate the Intellivision controller on the PS2 controller, making many of the games difficult to play. So, now that I have an original system coming, I can review some of the games for it along with all the other systems I've been doing. I hope you'll look forward to it.

Dragon Spirit

System TurboGrafx 16

Cheats Used: Infinite Health

I’m not a huge fan of scrolling shoot-em-ups, mainly because a lot of them are very similar and don’t have anything special to differentiate one from another. For this reason, I like to play those shmups which do try to break the mold and do something different. Namco’s Dragon Spirit is one of those. Rather than a spaceship shooting down other spaceships (which is what shmups usually are), in this game you play a dragon, flying through various fantasy settings and using your flames to battle a wide variety of wild creatures. Since I love dragons, this premise appealed to me immediately.

This game is very good on a technical level with tight controls, good level design, creative boss fights, and catchy music. However, I imagine that the absurdly tough difficulty would be a big deterrent to most players. If I hadn’t cheated, I never would have made it past the first level. The last two levels in particular would be a nightmare for anyone trying to finish the game normally, and the final boss? Forget it! On the other hand, if you’re looking for just such a challenge, then I can certainly recommend this as one of the hardest games I’ve played. All I can say is good luck. You’ll need it.

The Super Mario Bros Super Show!

In the late 80’s, Super Mario Bros. was one of the most popular video games in the world. It was only natural that someone would turn it into a TV show. That someone was DIC and the 65 episodes they produced ran five days a week in syndication. There were two parts to the show: first, of course was the Mario Bros. cartoon where Mario, Luigi, Toad and Princess Toadstool battled King Koopa in almost every episode. These cartoons would often be take offs on movies or popular legends. Bookending the cartoons were live action segments (sometimes with guest stars) set at the Mario Bros.’ plumbing business in Brooklyn. Once a week on Fridays, the Mario Bros. cartoon would be replaced by a Legend of Zelda one (“Well, excuuuuuuse me, princess!”).

The show is goofy, cheesy, tacky, all of the above, but it’s still fun to watch and there are some genuinely funny moments in it. Of particular note is Captain Lou Albano’s memorable performance as Mario. If you liked the show as a kid, it’s worth revisiting and if you’ve never seen it, you should give it a try. It’s kind of a shame that Nintendo games don’t get cartoons anymore, but Shout Factory has been nice enough to release the ones we did get on DVD and for that, they should be commended.

Battle Robot Retsuden

System: Super NES

Cheats Used: None

In Japan, there is a well known series called Super Robot Taisen which features mecha and pilots from multiple different anime series coming together for strategy/war games. This game appears to be a spinoff from that as it features the same thing. I don’t know what the plot is supposed to be because the game is totally in Japanese and there hasn’t been an English translation yet. However, despite this, the game is still very playable. It only took me a few minutes of fiddling with the menus to figure out how to play and once I figured it out, I had a great time with it.

The gameplay is fairly simple. Each level has multiple enemy mechs and you move your character around the battlefield and attack when you’ve got the enemy in range. In the first level, you fight them alone, but after that, more people join your team. You control a different mech in each level and the computer controls the ones that you’re not. The AI here is awesome and makes the game completely non-frustrating, which is a big plus. Add to that the fact that all your team members have a very high amount of HP and it’s almost impossible to lose. This is another excellent effort from Banpresto (who make all the best anime-based games) and if you’re a fan of mecha series like Gundam, I can’t recommend this highly enough.

Videogame Soundtracks On Youtube!

Hey guys! I wanted to tell you all about the most awesome youtube channel ever. This guy uploads "suites" of videogame music so you can get an entire game soundtrack in one ten to fifteen minute suite. the link is http://www.youtube.com/user/grad1u5 . Definitely check it out, you might find something you like.

Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout

System: NES

Cheats Used: None

This was Kemco’s second and last Bugs Bunny game for the NES and it was released to coincide with Bugs’s 50th anniversary celebration (which I recall went on for a year and included a TV special and the first new Bugs cartoon in about 20 years). Like Crazy Castle, Birthday Blowout is simple yet challenging. Most of the challenge, though comes from some tricky platforming bits. The game is otherwise fairly easy because most enemies can be avoided and you rack up a ridiculous amount of extra lives by collecting all the carrots you see and using them in a bonus game after every level

There’s a good amount of variety in the environments you traverse and there’s a boss fight every two levels (although some of the bosses repeat). One particularly clever boss fight has both Foghorn Leghorn and Henery Hawk and the trick is that you’re supposed to hit only one of them with the other being a decoy. Also, in the later parts of the game, there were several levels that I had to try several times to get through, so it does provide some challenge. All in all, this is a nice alternative to Mario if you don’t feel like playing that one for the hundredth time. Thumbs up!

Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle

System: NES

Cheats Used: None

My sisters and I received an NES for Christmas when I was four years old. Aside from Mario, Crazy Castle was the first videogame I ever played and I must admit, I still have a soft spot for it. The game has a whopping 60 levels and each one is like a puzzle. The enemies move in patterns and the challenge is to memorize these patterns and use them to get through the levels. Each level has a password, but you’re not likely to need them unless you don’t feel like playing through the whole game in one go because with each level you complete you get an extra life, making it nearly impossible to run out.

Some levels are tricky and took me several tries, but most are easy enough that anyone should be able to beat the game without much trouble. What’s interesting about this game is that it was originally based on Roger Rabbit, but someone else had the American videogame rights to that film, so Kemco changed it to Bugs Bunny for its American release. The series would have four sequels on the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, with the last one featuring Woody Woodpecker in place of Bugs Bunny. I’ve not played the sequels, but the original is great fun and an excellent way to kill a couple of hours.

The Itchy and Scratchy Game

System: Super NES

Cheats Used: None

Here’s a game that should have worked. The Itchy and Scratchy shorts have always been one of the best parts of The Simpsons (with the one that opens the movie being the best of them), so it seems like a game starring the duo would be a lot of fun. Sadly, this is not the case. The game finds you playing as Itchy and the goal is to kill Scratchy before he kills you. However, there are two problems.

First, your default weapon, the mallet, does very little damage so you have to upgrade to a better weapon, but they only let you have two upgrades and they expire quickly. The second problem is that Scratchy seems to have far more health than you because he takes a lot of hits to kill while you can only take a few, which makes the game extremely unfair. I wasn’t even able to make it past the first level because of this. Spy vs. Spy this ain’t. At least that game made your deaths funny so you didn’t mind so much.

The Amazing Spider-Man

System: Game Boy Cheats Used: Infinite Health, Infinite Webbing The Angry Video Game Nerd hated this game, but I think it’s fun. The controls aren’t perfect, but they’re responsive enough not to be a problem. The game has six levels and you get three lives and three continues. At the end of each level, you fight one of Spider-Man’s foes, including Mysterio, Hobgoblin, Scorpion, Rhino, Doctor Octopus and Venom. The main challenge of the game comes from the fact that the bosses’ attacks are hard to avoid while getting a hit in and in the last couple of levels, the mooks you fight are also hard to avoid. Without cheats, I was able to make it to level four and I only turned the cheats on to see the last two levels. There’s not much to say about this one except that I had a good time with it and if you’re a fan of Spidey, you could do worse.

Wayne's World

System: Sega Genesis

Cheats Used: Infinite Health

I’m a big fan of Wayne’s World. The movie is one of my all time favorites. So imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the game is a horrible, worthless piece of crap. Seriously, this is one of the worst games I’ve ever played. I would have turned it off except I hit the final boss just as I decided to quit.

First, you start off with five hit points and you can refill them as you go through the levels, but that doesn’t help when almost every hazard is almost impossible to avoid. Second, the level design is confusing and it’s easy to get lost and wind up back where you were a few minutes ago. Third, the between-level bits with Wayne and Garth are lame and not even the slightest bit funny. Fourth, hearing Wayne say “Not!” every time he gets hit gets very annoying very fast because you get hit a lot. Fifth, the levels are all very bland and there’s little to no variety between them. In short, this game is an absolute train wreck and should be avoided at all costs.

Movie Review: The Wizard

Anyone who’s heard of this film knows it’s nothing more than an ad for Nintendo. In fact, when the film was first released, its main selling point was that viewers would get a first glimpse of Super Mario Bros. 3, which wouldn’t be released in the states for another year or so. However, despite the film’s status as a feature length commercial, it still manages to be entertaining.

The plot, such as it is, involves two kids (one of whom is autistic) who run away from home to compete in a video game tournament when it’s discovered that the autistic boy is a gaming wizard (hence the title). Shades of Tommy, perhaps? The acting is about as good as you’d expect for a film of this type and the writing is fairly solid, although there are some moments of unintentional humor, which, some would argue, makes the film more enjoyable. In any case, this film ought to be required viewing for anyone with an interest in gaming history because it offers a snapshot of just how Nintendo-crazy America was in the late 1980s. It really is quite fascinating.

Transformers: Convoy no Nazo (The Mystery of Convoy)

System: NES

Cheats Used: Invincibility

In this game based on the classic G1 TV series, Optimus Prime has disappeared and, as Ultra Magnus, you must traverse ten levels to rescue him. This game is notorious for its difficulty, and after trying it without cheats, I can see why. You only get three lives to make it through the game and you die if you get hit just once. Also, level nine is a maze similar to the ones in Super Mario Bros., but in this game, rather then looping around, it lets you get all the way to the end of the level before bumping you back to the start if you took the wrong path. In this day and age when cheats are just a Google search away, I honestly wonder how many gamers have made it to the end without them. Still, even so, this is a fun game to play and if you’re a fan of Transformers at all, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.

I'm Back!

Hi all! After five solid days and a total of about 25 hours, I'm just about finished with Pokemon Black. I've got all the gym badges and I've captured all the legendaries it's possible to capture at this point, including Victini.All that's left is to level up my team some more before taking on the elite four and N. That's gonna take awhile, so I'll work on it a little at a time and I'll start posting here again.

I can tell you that if you like Pokemon at all, you have to play this one because it's the best game of the series so far. They've added a number of great features (like TMs being infinite use now and your pokemon no longer losing HP from poisoning outside of battle) that make the game much more enjoyable. The new pokemon are awesome and the fact that they level up quicker in this game makes grinding less of a hassle. Also, if I ever manage to finish the main story, there's a ton of stuff to do afterwards, which is nice. It's easy to see why Famitsu gave this game a perfect score (something they rarely do) and I recommend it very highly.

PAUSE

Pokemon Black comes out today and it's going to be taking up a lot of my time for the next couple of weeks at least. I'll still be posting stuff here but it's gonna be infrequent for the immediate future. Sorry, but I've been excited about Black for a year and once I have it in my hands, I'm not gonna wanna put it down right away. Once I finish the main story, I'll start posting more regularly again, I promise. I hope you'll bear with me.

Bonk's Adventure

System: TurboGrafX 16

Cheats Used: Infinite Lives

After Nintendo’s Mario series defined the NES for a whole generation of kids, it became standard practice for other console developers to invent mascots of their own. NEC’s mascot was Bonk, a little caveman with a big head. Bonk would star in three games and have a spinoff set in the future featuring his descendant, Zonk. In this first adventure, you have to save Princess Za and the people of Moonland from Evil King Drool. The only weapon you have is Bonk’s head, which you can use to bash enemies.

Like most games of this type, it starts out pretty easy and then gets harder the closer you get to the end. Level 5-5 is especially brutal because you have to refight all the previous bosses plus a new one. This is why I used an infinite lives cheat, because I knew I was going to need every last one. So how does Bonk compare to other famous mascots? Quite well, actually. NEC never had a superstar like Shigeru Miyamoto in their corner, but despite this, they managed to come up with a good, fun, well-designed game that I think can stand proudly alongside the best of what Nintendo and Sega had to offer. I’d love to see a new Bonk game on the current systems, but someone has to remember he exists first.

The Great Maze

System: NES

Cheats Used: None

Now this is a maze game done right! In this first-person game, you have to find all the key fragments before you can exit the maze. You can also find various powerups to help you along (you can play minigames to get some of them). The first level is easy enough to ease you into the game, and then the challenge level rises sharply, with level two being two floors and level three being three floors. To add to the challenge, you only have a limited amount of time to finish the level before you get a game over and have to try again (although you can continue from the beginning of the level). This is what Gals’ Dungeon should have been.

Gal's Dungeon

System: Famicom Disk System
Cheats Used: None
In this first-person maze game, you have to go through nine levels of a tower to rescue someone’s granddaughter. I usually enjoy maze games, but this one was very disappointing. The mazes are too easy to provide any challenge at all, the boss fights (if you can call it that) are nothing more than a game of “rock, paper, scissors”, and to top it all off, there’s some kind of glitch on level eight that makes it impossible to finish the game. Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all. As a point of interest, every other level or so, you get a picture of a naked woman for your trouble. Whatever.

Alien

System: Atari 2600 VCS

This game, titled after the famous sci-fi movie, is a Pac-Man clone in which you run around a maze racking up points and trying to avoid the alien monsters. Like, Pac-Man, you can grab a powerup to turn the tables on the aliens, but in a nice little twist, only one powerup is on the board at a time and when you grab it, another one appears elsewhere in the maze so the challenge is to get to the powerups without getting eaten. Funnily enough, this is a much better game, and much more fun to play, than Atari’s own version of Pac-Man! Kudos to 20th Century Fox. It really is a shame that they gave up on game development after the industry crash of ‘83 (temporarily, anyway). If they’d kept going, there’s no telling what kind of awesomeness they could have produced for the NES. Oh well.

Pokemon Red

System: Game Boy

Cheats Used: None


To prepare for the release of Pokemon Black, I decided to replay the original game, Pokemon Red. I confess that when I first discovered the game in 1999, I became a bit of an addict, buying up all the videos of the cartoon series (which I still watch occasionally) and collecting all kinds of merchandise. There were several nights I skipped sleep and stayed up all night playing the game and when I got to the end, there was a tremendous feeling of accomplishment. The fact that the creator of Pokemon, Satoshi Tajiri, is autistic is a great inspiration to me and he’s become one of my personal heroes.

So how does the game hold up after all these years? Not too bad, actually. It does seem rather primitive compared to the more recent installments, but then, the idea was in its infancy when the game was made and things like berries, abilities and online pokemon trading hadn’t been imagined yet. What we’re left with is a relatively straightforward game that’s easy enough for anyone to play, yet challenging enough for even the most hardcore players.

The story here is simple: You are a new pokemon trainer and your aim is to defeat the eight gym leaders and eventually battle the Elite 4 and the champion. Once that’s accomplished, the game is over. Along the way, you must stop the evil Team Rocket and their boss, Giovanni, but this subplot only takes up about a third of the game with the rest of it comprised of capturing, raising and battling pokemon. Like most RPGs, level grinding before fighting a gym leader can get very tedious, but the rewards for doing so more than make up for it. The game does an excellent job of drawing you into this world and making you care about the characters and the pokemon you raise. It’s not at all surprising that the series has done as well as it has

What’s interesting is that before the original game was released, Nintendo didn’t think it would sell and was prepared to write it off as a loss. No one was more surprised than they were when it became an international phenomenon. In fact, the anime was only supposed to last one season and was extended indefinitely when they realized what a massive hit they had on their hands. Since then, they’ve done a great job of providing the fans a steady stream of new games while still maintaining a consistent level of quality such that even a subpar entry (as many thought Diamond/Pearl to be) will outsell just about any other game out there. The series may no longer be in the public eye the way it used to be, but as long as the games are good I imagine it will continue for many years to come.

Ms. Pac-Man

System: Sega Genesis

Cheats Used: None

Now this is what I call a fantastic arcade translation! In this version of Midway’s classic game produced by Tengen (Atari’s multiconsole development arm), you not only get a perfect port of the arcade original, but you are given a multitude of options to customize the experience. First, you have the ability to set the difficulty level at Easy, Normal, Hard or Crazy. Second, you can turn on the “Pac Booster” setting which allows you to move two or three times faster while keeping the ghosts at regular speed. This setting makes the game a lot more fun (at least for me), but it’s a double-edged sword because in the later levels when the ghosts speed up, it becomes harder and harder to dodge them, thus making the game more challenging.

Third, in addition to the regular one-player game, there are options for two-player cooperative, two-player competitive and two-player alternating. Last but not least, there are no less than four different sets of mazes to choose from: Arcade, Strange, Big or Mini. A nice feature is that from the start you can choose to begin on a later level up to level seven and once you’re past that and into the higher levels, you can continue up to four times when you lose all your lives, although continuing resets your score to zero. This is a good way to get some practice on the tougher mazes. Using my continues, I was able to get to level 14 or 15, far beyond what I was ever able to do in the original game. Tengen ought to be commended for creating such a superlative experience and if you like Pac-Man at all, you should definitely give this one a try. You won’t be disappointed.

Double Dungeons

System: TurboGrafX 16

Cheats Used: None

This straightforward yet challenging game is an old-school dungeon crawler viewed from a first person perspective. The objective is simple: Run around a dungeon killing monsters to gain experience and gold to upgrade your weapons, then find the boss and defeat it. Once the boss is defeated, you move on to the next dungeon. This game, which is notable for being the first two-player RPG, has been criticized for being overly long, boring and tedious. Personally, I think it’s kind of fun and I imagine it would be even more fun with two players, but I can definitely see where it could get tedious after awhile. It took me a couple of hours to finish the first dungeon. There are 22 dungeons in all and they get bigger and more complex as you go along. You’d need the patience of a saint to get through them all. I’ll probably do a couple more dungeons myself and then use a password to skip to the end.

X-MEN (Arcade Game)

Emulated via MAME

Cheats Used: None

Ah, X-Men. My favorite Marvel series (thanks largely to the excellent 90s cartoon). Growing up, I think the X-Men appealed to me because my autism made me feel like a mutant (still does, in fact) and I was able to identify with the characters easily. This arcade game was released alongside a pilot called “Pryde of the X-Men”. The pilot (which is corny, yet fun) failed to produce a series, but hey, we got a cool game out of it. At the start, you can pick from six characters: Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Dazzler. I played through as Dazzler. As you move through the levels, you mostly fight Sentinels, every mutant’s natural enemy. At the end of every level is a boss, usually one of the X-Men’s great villains (Pyro, The Blob, Emma Frost, etc.) and eventually you meet Magneto for a final showdown. In addition to your standard attack, you can also use your mutant power. However, doing so drains your health bar. Fortunately, this being run on an emulator, you have infinite continues, so I was able to spam my mutant power during boss fights. The “engrish” in this game is hilarious (“I am Magneto! Master of magnet!”), which only adds to the charm. All in all, one of the best superhero games. Highly recommended.

Super Mario Bros.

System: NES

Cheats Used: Infinite lives

Having not played this game in years, I thought it would be the perfect place to start. After all, it is one of the most important games ever made. I don’t think I would be exaggerating by saying that Super Mario Bros. single-handedly saved the videogame industry after the great crash of 1983.

The game is notable for several reasons. First, it cemented the gameplay style of 2D, side-scrolling plat formers, a genre that would be the dominant one for years. Second, it cemented the idea of a “killer app”, that one game you would be willing to buy the system in order to play. Third, by being packed in with the system when you bought it, it cemented the idea that you should expect a free game when you bought the system. This last is something that is still occasionally done (i.e. Wii Sports and the various bundles for the Xbox 360).

What’s amazing is that even after all these years, it is still a fantastically fun game to play. The last four levels are still fiendishly difficult, especially the maze of the final castle. If you tell me you figured it out without looking at a guide, you’re lying. It’s a good thing I had infinite lives, ’cause I’d have never finished otherwise. The final castle alone took me 30 or 40 tries. It didn’t help that I spent most of the game as small Mario. Naturally, I died a lot. But that’s okay because that’s what cheat codes are for.

I realize that “hardcore” gamers are probably laughing at me right now, but ya know what? I don’t care. I play videogames for the fun of it and to me, cheat codes make games more fun because it gives me a chance of actually completing them. I admire someone who’s good enough not to need them, but I’m not that good. Thankfully, more modern games are generally easier, so I don’t use codes on them most of the time, although there can still be some challenge (like the FLUDDless levels in Super Mario Sunshine, which can make you want to break the controller at times). TVTropes doesn’t call it “Nintendo Hard” for nothing, ya know.

Press Start

Hi all! Welcome to my blog. My goal in life is to become known as America's foremost videogame historian. I'm currently writing a book about old school gaming in general and if it gets published, I plan on writing more books focusing on more specific topics (such as a book about the TurboGrafx 16 or a book about the best games that never got published in the states). This blog will focus on retrogame reviews and I may post other things from time to time. I hope you all enjoy it. If you have any requests for games you'd like me to review, let me know and I'll see what I can do. Now, onward!